When he was a senior at Brown, Donald Ariel took a graduate-level class
in ancient coins in which the professor assigned cataloguing a coin
collection at Wheaton College in nearby Norton, Massachusetts. The
collection consisted of 250 coins, all of them minted during the time
of ancient Greece or Rome.

Courtesy Donald Ariel

Ariel at a dig in Israel.

"We were told to do the full Monty," Ariel says. "Learn how to organize
the collection, how to identify the coins, how to find the relevant
reference material, and how to write up a catalog describing each one
and its significance." Ariel, who concentrated in ancient Mediterranean
civilization, describes this as a watershed moment in his college
education, his first chance at touching archaeological artifacts.

Ariel now lives in Jerusalem, where he oversees Israel's national coin
collection for the Antiquities Authority, a quasi-governmental agency
that directs archaeological digs in the country and helps preserve the
findings. The collection holds a million coins, some dating as far back
as the sixth century B.C. Ariel is a U.S. citizen, but he moved to
Israel in 1976 and earned a master's in archaeology from Hebrew
University. (More recently, he earned a PhD in the subject from Tel
Aviv University.)

Coins, Ariel says, are a rich repository of knowledge about the
civilization that mints them. With an image of the current leader on
their obverse side, they are easily datable and can even help date the
structures where they're unearthed. Ariel says that Israel's collection
of coins is remarkable not because of its size—collections in New York
and Paris are larger—but because each is linked to a record of where
and when it was discovered. Having such reliable records of how deep
the coin lay buried or where it was in relation to other artifacts
helps create a more detailed and richer understanding of the
archaeological site.

In August, near the border with Lebanon, researchers found a
2,200-year-old gold coin from the Ptolemaic era, the most valuable coin
ever found in Israel. It bears the image of Queen Arsinoe II
Philadelphus, who ruled over Egypt in the early third century B.C. and
who has the distinction of having married her brother. (Philadelphoi means brother-loving in Greek.)

Ariel himself does not keep a personal coin collection. But he does go
on digs every summer and still enjoys keeping in physical touch with
antiquity through the objects the Authority has in its collection. "I
chose to come to Israel because I can directly connect to the objects
I'm working on," he says. "I can go to the sites that I'm studying by
getting in the car and visiting."

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.